The Elements of Justice

Description

What is justice? Questions of justice are questions about what people are due. However, what that means in practice depends on the context in which the question is raised. Depending on context, the formal question of what people are due is answered by principles of desert, reciprocity, equality, or need. Justice, therefore, is a constellation of elements that exhibit a degree of integration and unity. Nonetheless, the integrity of justice is limited, in a way that is akin to the integrity of a neighborhood rather than that of a building. A theory of justice offers individuals a map of that neighborhood, within which they can explore just what elements amount to justice.

David Schmidtz is Professor of Philosophy, joint Professor of Economics, and Director of the Program of Philosophy of Freedom at the University of Arizona. He is the author of Rational Choice and Moral Agency and co-author, with Robert Goodin, of Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility. He is editor of Robert Nozick and edited, with Elizabeth Willott, Environmental Ethics: What Really Matters, What Really Works. His lectures on justice have taken him to sixteen countries and six continents.

"...(W)hat makes Elements of Justice so rich and compelling is that Schmidtz does not follow the dominant pattern of philosophical argumentation..." Adam Kadlac, The Hedgehog Review